Sr Mgr - E&O Automation & AI

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United's Digital Technology team is comprised of many talented individuals all working together with cutting-edge technology to build the best airline in the history of aviation. Our team designs, develops and maintains massively scaling technology solutions brought to life with innovative architectures, data analytics, and digital solutions.

Job Overview and Responsibilities

The Manager of Automation & AI is responsible for leading the strategy, governance, development, and adoption of industry leading automation and Artificial Intelligence capabilities across the Engineering and Operations, and Digital Technology services. This role focuses on identifying, prioritizing, designing, implementing and measuring success of solutions that improve service reliability, operational efficiency, employee productivity, and customer outcomes.

The position serves as a key transformation leader, partnering with engineering, AI COE, operations, platform, service management, and business teams to create and execute an enterprise automation and AI roadmap. The role drives the adoption of modern technologies including workflow automation, orchestration, agentic AI, generative AI, self-healing operations, and intelligent service delivery capabilities.

This leader is accountable for building scalable delivery models, establishing governance standards, developing workforce capabilities, and ensuring that automation and AI investments generate measurable business value with the appropriate metrics. The role balances strategic planning with hands-on execution leadership to accelerate technology modernization and operational transformation initiatives

• Define and execute the Engineering and Operations Automation & AI implementation plan and strategy
• Develop and maintain a prioritized automation and AI roadmap aligned to organizational goals
• Establish governance processes, intake models, prioritization frameworks, and value realization methodologies
• Lead identification and evaluation of automation and AI opportunities across infrastructure, operations, engineering, service management, and platform teams
• Create executive-level metrics and reporting that demonstrate business value, efficiency gains, and operational improvements
• Partner with senior technology leaders to align investments and priorities
• Define standards, methodologies, reusable patterns, development practices, and guardrails
• Drive consistency across automation, workflow orchestration, agentic AI, generative AI, and intelligent operations initiatives across Engineering and Operations
• Create governance structures for use case intake, backlog management, delivery execution, and operational support
• Promote enterprise adoption through community engagement, communications, coaching, and best practice sharing
• Manage staffing models and capability development plans
• Lead matrixed teams responsible for development and deployment of automation and AI solutions
• Manage end-to-end lifecycle activities including ideation, design, development, testing, deployment, adoption, measurement, and continuous improvement
• Facilitate sprint planning, backlog prioritization, release management, and delivery reviews as appropriate
• Ensure solutions are scalable, secure, measurable, and aligned with enterprise architecture standards
• Partner with service owners and operational teams to identify manual, repetitive, and high-volume activities suitable for automation
• Drive implementation of self-service capabilities, workflow automation, intelligent ticket routing, predictive operations, and self-healing solutions
• Reduce operational toil and increase efficiency through automation-first practices
• Build Engineering and Operations organizational Automation & AI capabilities through training, coaching, and workforce enablement programs
• Partner with service owners, AI COE, and engineering teams to identify, prioritize, and implement high-value AI and automation opportunities
• Lead adoption of automation-first and AI-enabled ways of working across technology teams
• Develop talent pipelines, career paths, and skill development plans supporting future-state technology capabilities
• Foster a culture of innovation, continuous improvement,…